Category Archives: 3D Modeling

The Northern Virginia Community College is working on a T-Shirt 3D Printer. They invited me to come by and show the students how they could use Blender and Bezier Curves to turn 2D ideas into simple 3D models for the T-Shirt Printer. I had an absolutely fantastic time, as I always do talking about 3D Printing. If you missed it, you can still follow along with my slides from SlideShare.

Now that Maker Faire Nova is behind me, I am aiming to get my Upcycling models up and available to download for the community. This model preexisted my recent Maker Faire Nova efforts. I designed this Cork Kitty as a companion piece to EHM’s Cork Puppy back in the summer of 2015. They have been popular at Craft Fairs and black cats are particularly popular at Halloween.

I typically make the eyes green and the nose and ears pink. You can add paint to the whiskers. A dark grey looks particularly striking on black cats. I have done custom orders on Etsy where we mimick the markings to real cats.

I had a friend put a slice through the cork to hold labels describing all the dishes at a Halloween party.

A Friend Used a Set of Black Cats as Buffet Labels for a Halloween Pot Luck

Although they are made from wine corks, I have found them to have appeal to children. They love playing for them! Happy making!

Greetings All! Working with Packt, I wrote a project-based learning book to teach Blender for 3D Printing. It got published last week! I decided my return to YouTube should be called, “You Guys, I Wrote a Book!!!”.

The book walks through four separate projects to teach Blender tools and skills.
Profile Pendant

One of the things that gives Blender its reputation of having a large learning curve is it is geared towards animation. It has a lot of extra features or capabilities we don’t use for 3D Printing.

Or do we?

Homesick for the Appalachian Trail, I embarked on making rhododendron themed drawer pulls. It was a Blender animation feature helped me pull off my vision. I had never heard of “Particle Systems” before and with good cause. They are typically used for animating dust, smoke, water, and hair. Thanks to a wonderful tutorial video by Blender Facile, I learned how I could also use this feature to convert a single flower model into the trademark ball of flowers for the rhododendron.

My steps for using the Particular System were:

First, I made a model of an individual flower. Thinking about how I wanted this to be sturdy for people to grab, I kept the petals thick and shallow.

To convert my single flower into a ball of flowers, the first thing I did was add an Ico Sphere with 2 subdivisions to my Blender project.

I went ahead and removed the bottom half of my Ico Sphere and gave it a flat bottom.

Once I was satisfied with my Ico Sphere, I clicked on the Particle Systems icon

I clicked on New to create a new Particle System

I changed Type to “Hair”

I checked the Advanced box which would allow me to change some rotation settings later

Under the Emissions section, I clicked Verts. This is telling Blender that each “hair” (aka flower) is going to be associated with a vertex in my model. For Number, I put in 26. This just happens to be the number of vertices in my modified Ico Sphere.
I also unchecked the Random box.

Under the Rotation section, I first checked Rotation and then for Initial Orientation, I picked Normal. The system is going to rely on my Face normals (the direction my faces are) to determine which way to rotate my “hairs”.

Under the Render section, I picked Object and for Dupli Object, I selected the single Flower model I made. And then my flowers appeared on my sphere.

Under the Render section, I checked Rotate and my flowers oriented themselves accordingly.

Since this is a feature geared towards animation, there is a large Physics section that really does not apply to my purposes. The one thing I did play with was the Size. By adjusting this setting, I was able to get my flowers to a size that provided some good coverage over the Ico Sphere.

Once I was satisfied with all my settings, I clicked on the Modifiers icon and clicked on Convert.

All of my “hairs” (aka flowers) became official objects in Blender. I was able to click on each one and manipulate it like any other Blender object. For example, I went ahead and rotated my bottom row of flowers to better achieve the look I was going for.

Eureka! I had my ball of flowers! My modeling journey was far from over, but the hardest part about that journey was done, thanks to an animation feature I never thought I would need.

Greetings! I am starting to build up quite a collection of 3D Printed buildings! Today I thought I would give you a little tour of them and my design process and share some of my design guidelines and tips.

I’m from Prince WIlliam County Virginia which is outside of Washington, DC. With the exception one gazebo from New York, all my buildings hail from Prince William County, Virginia and most of those right smack from my town, Occoquan. So far, I have

Mamie Davis Gazebo in Occoquan, Virginia

The National Museum of the United States Marine Corps from Quantico

Mill House Museum in Occoquan, Virginia

Rockledge Mansion from Occoquan Virginia

And then, a custom piece, My Old Neighbor’s House, Occoquan Virginia.

All of these I modeled in Blender and they all start with one thing.

Reference Images
I go out and take reference images. In the case of my neighbor’s house, the prints were a gift and I needed to exercise stealth, so I actually tromped through the woods to snag some pictures of the back of the house. In the case of the Rockledge Mansion, I emailed the home’s owner which allowed me to open up a dialogue with them and I scored an amazing tour of the outside and the inside on the mansion.

If I needed to supplement my own images, I found Flickr and Google Streetview to be a great resource for finding images of the more famous buildings

And…. there were two cases, where I really needed an aerial view to really get a good grasp of the building. The National Museum of the United States Marine Corps is a great example of that. I had all these side images and I just still could not figure out the geometry of the building. Something wasn’t right. Google Earth to the rescue! The aerial image was the missing piece I needed and suddenly everything clicked together.

Base Model
Blender does have the ability where I can create what’s called an Empty and import in an image. I can rotate these, scale them, make them translucent, so it is very helpful for me as I’m trying to get the proportions of my base shapes right.

Detailing
With the detailing, I have done it a very formal way where my windows and my doors are actually a part of the base model. I used a tool called Loop Cut and Slide to make segments in my house where I’m going to put my windows and doors and then I extrude and subdivide accordingly. What I’ve decided I preferred is do model these details as separate objects. I’ll have Window Model, a Door Model, a Light model, A Railing model. I rather enjoy how easy it is to copy and paste that way.

Tip – When you are doing separate models with your detailing (and you aren’t going to do formal Boolean Unions in Blender), you want to make sure they are exactly flush with the base house. At least in Simplify 3D, if there is overlap, Simplify 3D will leave gaps between the two objects– whereas if you have them lined up exactly, you can be super lazy in Blender and Simplify 3D will recognize them as objects that should be one and slice accordingly.

Detailing Design Guidelines
With my detailing, I tend to keep them 0.3mm – 0.5mm high. With my 0.35mm and 0.40mm nozzles, those “90 degree overhangs” have no trouble on my printers, don’t need supports and still render very well in the final print.

Detailing Tour – Windows
Like most things the window detailing is about 0.3mm – 0.5mm high. In my neighbor’s house, for example, the panes are 0.4mm high and then the shutters are another 0.1mm above that.

Tip – Slice as you go
When I’m working with small details and I want to make sure they translate, one thing I do is slice as I go. A perfect example of this is window panes. My Mill House Museum, the windows came out fine on a Shapeways fancy Sand Stone Printer. When I went and printed it on my FFF printer, I noted the vertical panes were too thin so the printer didn’t bother with them. In subsequent models, I’ll preslice sections to see how it is going to look on my intended printer.

If you don’t slice as you go and you find some missing details, there are options. In Simplify3D, you can try to adjust Horizontal Size Compensation (It’s under the Other tab) to get a better slice.

Detailing Tour – Outdoor Lights, Bay Windows, Garage Overhangs
I modeled the light, but there was deviation from real life— if you look at it from the side, I taper the bottom up– I give it a nice 45 degree angle to help with the overhangs. I did the same thing with the Bay Window and also you’ll see a small triangular wedge between the car port and a screened in porch. This is just to give the printer some solid overhangs to work with.

Detailing Tour – Railings
The biggest trick to the railings is coming up with the dimensions with the slats. I didn’t want something too delicate. I have found 0.65 – 0.85mm to work.

And I reused through measurements on my neighbor’s house. I just got and pasted to get their detailing for their screened in porches.

Detailing Tour – Supporting Posts
When I got to my neighbor’s house, I had some posts that would be supporting an awning. I went ahead and increased that to be over 2mm thick on each side so there was more strength and stability.

Detailing Tour – Awning Hack
And with the awnings, I wanted to print those without supports. What I ended up doing there is I had two small layers connecting the main house with the posts. My very own support beams. They were just 0.5mm high which meant my printer would print two layers for it. Then, the rest of the awning came in and bridging settings kicked with ample parts to “bridge to”

Textures
There are other approaches you can do with textures. You can, for example, use a grey scale texture map and use the Distortion modifier. I have found that to be a little intensive on my machine resources and making it difficult to continue to the tweak the model.

I do have a few “textures” I add to these models — stonework, brickwork, shingles, and finally siding. These I believe are mostly 0.3mm high. The Stonework I did slightly as purist. I actually used Bezier Curves to trace out real stones from one of the historic buildings in my town (Note– there are many ways to skin this cat). For bricks, siding, and shingles, I modeled one piece and then used the Array Feature in Blender to make an entire sheet.

Remember with the Spinning Pokestop, I talked about the Power of Intersection? This is an example of that. By Duplicating key vertices and separating them, I would make a template of the part of the model I wanted texture for. Let’s take the front of my Rockledge Mansion. I wouldn’t want Stonework where the windows and doors were. So I make an object of just want I want textured.

I put my textured piece, in this case, the Stonework in the middle of it and then I take an Intersetion. Viola! Texture.

And just like my other details, I make sure that is flush exactly with my base model, so it slices nice and fine in Simplify 3D.

Hack – Use Layer Lines To Your Advantage
I had been doing shingles for everything… until my very last model, my Neighbor’s House. I was doing a “Slice As You Go” and I noticed, the natural layer lines looked remarkably like shingles, so I rolled with it.

Despite some earlier blog posts on the matter, I have become fond of using Inkscape to make SVG files for my 3D Models. (My breakthrough came when I started saving as a “Plain SVG” format instead of an “Inkscape SVG” format).

I figured I should document my process at pulling and prepping those files in Blender.

Import the SVG file. File->Import->Scalable Vector Graphics (.svg)

It looks like nothing happened, but your SVG is there. It’s just really really really small. If you look to the right in your Objects listing, you can see a new “Curve” that was not there before.

Resize the object so you can see it better.

Sometimes resizing it takes it off the screen and the Object’s Origin is not very intuitive For that, I change the Object’s Origin to the Center of the Mass. I do that by going to Object->Transform->Center of Mass

Then I can change all the Transform coordinates to 0,0,0 to center my new SVG

SVGs pull in as Curves. You’ll want to convert it to a Mesh before doing anything with it. You can do that by going to Object->Convert to->Mesh from Curve/Meta/Serf/Text

OPTIONAL – Get Rid of Black Color
When I was new to Blender and Inkscape, I could not figure out why my Inkscape SVGs were all black… and I just did not know enough to find the right keywords to Google. Later when I learned about Materials, it will started to click. The SVGs import in with a Default Material. If you want to get rid of that, click on the Materials icon for your object, click on the black material and hit – to get rid of it.

With your newly converted Mesh selected, switch to Edit mode.

Click A to select all vertices.

Go to Extrude->Region to give your 2D Object some Depth. If you can you the mouse to size or type in a measurement– for example 0.5 for 0.5mm.

At the time of publishing this video, I have about 8 days left until Maker Faire Nova on March 19, 2017. More information about the event and tickets can be purchased at http://nova.makerfaire.com/

For my third time participating, I am focusing on 3D prints with embedded elements. With the help of my MakerGear M2, the Wanhao Duplicator i3, and my ever trusty Simplify3D, here’s what I got brewing:

The owners of Heroic Aleworks, don’t just consider themselves brewers, but nerds as well! As a great compliment to their very geeky tasting room (they even have a bathroom painted like a tardis), they have 3D Printed Tap Handles.

This is a great illustration of the “rapid product development” 3D Printing is touted for. They approached me on a Tuesday and we had working Tap Handles by Friday!

To make the tap handles functional, we embedded a standard 3/8″ nut into the print itself to screw onto the keg hardware and that’s where the project got fun!

This video talks about how thinking about the printing orientation ahead of time impacted the design, particularly with the consideration of the hole for the nut.

It also goes over my multiple processes in Simplify 3D and my custom starting and end scripts (same old, same old– very similar to what was used for embedding mirrors and the multi colored Gyro Cube).